Trump-Appointed Judge Demands Evidence of Mail-in Voting Fraud

(Bloomberg) -- A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump gave the president’s campaign one day to turn over evidence to support its claims of widespread mail-in voting fraud or admit that it doesn’t exist.

The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee sued Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and local election boards on June 29 over their plan for mail-in balloting for the November 3 elections. Trump’s team claimed the plan “provides fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting, manipulate or destroy ballots, manufacture duplicitous votes, and sow chaos.”

U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan in Pittsburgh on Thursday asked the campaign to put forward previous examples of such fraud. “Plaintiffs shall produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much,” said Ranjan, who took his seat on the bench in August 2019. He gave the campaign until Friday.

Ranjan issued his order in response to a request by two advocacy groups he allowed to intervene in the case along with Pennsylvania Democrats, who have said the suit is an attempt to suppress the vote in a key swing state. The Trump campaign “should not be permitted to raise such spectacular fraud-related claims, particularly in this national climate, and refuse to provide discoverable information to substantiate those claims,” lawyers for the Sierra Club and Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future argued in court papers.

The case is Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar, 20-cv-966, U.S. District Court, Western District of Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh).

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